Different Perspectives of Innateness Controversy

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Submitted To:

Submitted By:

PROF. FRANSON MANJALI

RABI CHANDRA MANDAL, M.PHIL

CENTRE FOR LINGUISTICS

CENTRE FOR LINGUISTICS

SLL&CS, J.N.U.

SLL&CS, J.N.U.

ABSTRACT:
In this paper I am trying to explore my earlier work on mind and body problem deeper and
diagnosis of these problems. However this paper deals with different perspectives on innateness
controversy. There are mainly two approaches, one dealing with a philosophical view about
innate traits which is based on common sense and scientific investigation and another one based
on biological view, such as genetic determination. This paper also deals with Noam Chomsky's
views on Innateness theory. However the last part of the paper the biological explanation of
Innateness controversy has been discussed. It has been discussed and followed by the
conclusion.

INTRODUCTION:
Since time immemorial the complex and confusing phenomenon of Mind and Brain controversy
has fascinated human thinking which proposes that human mind born with ideas or knowledge.
The picture of the world and our place in it that lies behind such reflections has the effect of
bifurcating reality. There is, on the one hand, the outer material world, the world of trees,
forests, and sound waves. On the other hand, there is the inner mental world, the mind and its
contents1.There are mainly two questions related to the mind and body problem, as What is in
Mind? And How does a person get knowledge from the world about anything?. Historically
there are two approaches which try to answer this problem, one deals with the external world and
another with the internal part of the mind. However the idea of Innateness had been reflected in
the Platos philosophical thoughts and later it had been developed by Descartes in his
Meditations. The Empirical view about knowledge representation in the human brain has
strongly been criticized by Philosophers, which was a predominant belief and assumption in a
certain period of time. But in the course of narration of philosophical thoughts, some ideas has
been changed or replaced by another idea or merged one idea with another, such as David
Humes Version of Empiricism which states that the ideas or concepts which we are using to
think are actually copied from sensory impressions. One of the most notable work on mind and
knowledge had been done by the 17th centurys Philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his famous book
1

Heil John ,PHILOSOPHY OF MIND: A contemporary introduction , London and New York. Page-3

Critique of Pure Reason Kant has synthesized between rationalist and empiricist traditions
which was most relevance work because synthesis between two approaches gave a new direction
to mind and brain controversy. However in this paper I am discussing Rationalist Philosophrs,
because basically Innateness theory related to rationalist tradition.

Further, The Innate Theory of Language acquisition has been described in mid-20th (1959) by
Noam Chomsky as a reaction against the behaviorist language learning theory. The behaviorist
theory states that language is a kind of behaviour, a set of habits formation over the years.
Chomsky in his famous book Language and Mind(1972) proposed his famous theories on
language acquisition. According to Chomsky, language is one characteristic that is unique to
humans among all other living beings. Chomsky says language is being learned by Innate
property of the human mind, not by behaviour. To my knowledge, the only substantive proposal
to deal with the problem of acquisition of knowledge of language is the rationalist conception
that I have outlined. To repeat: suppose that we assign to the mind, as an innate property, the
general theory of language that we have called universal grammar.2 However, Chomskys
theories have made it easier to understand the evolution and development of the languages.

Genetic view of language says that language encoded by the gene. There is no doubt that
language is a biological property of humans. The human DNA contains a coded representation
of proteins, which are responsible for our behaviour, physical and mental traits. In the course of
mutation human DNA is being affected by the external world. In this paper I am trying to explain
different perspective of innateness theory . Basically innateness theory comes under rationalist
tradition, that is why in this paper I have discussed some rational philosopher, and biological
perspective of this theory.

Chomsky, N., Language and Mind , Cambridge University Press. Page-77

Philosophical Perspective:
It is very essential to discuss some mind and brain controversy, because Innateness is the central
concept of language and mind controversy. So let me start with philosophical controversy related
to internal and external knowledge of the mind Platos Problem:
The Plato's theory of was against the empiricist theory of knowledge. In his dialog Meno, Plato
gives the interesting argument about a priori knowledge that were really just remembering
things that we knew before we were born. Plato argues that we know what is the thing by
comparing them with the perfect form of that thing and that have in our minds. For example we
compare a book with that books bookness . If the object before us has sufficient bookness then
we say it is a book, even if we have never seen a book before.
Plato's problem and Chomsky's solutions: Basically Plato's problem referred as 'the poverty of
the stimulus argument' which states that the natural language grammar is not sufficient to learn
language due to the limited availability of linguistic data to children learning a language.
Therefore this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity.
Poor input

Rich output

This logical problem of language acquisition is also known as Platos problem, because this
problem already played an important role in Platos philosophy. According to Chomsky an
important part of grammatical knowledge that must be innate, which he called Structure
Dependency. Lets have a famous Chomskys example from J. V. Cook,s bookThe man

[who is tall]

Is the man

[who is tall]

* Is the man [who - tall]

is

John

STATEMENT

John? QUESTION A

is

John? QUESTION B

In question formation, an auxiliary verb moves to the front, note that in the first sentence has two
auxiliary. One is in main sentence and one in the embedded sentence. In QUESTION A SubAuxiliary is being applied to form interrogative sentences. QUESTION B is ungrammatical
sentence. Here Chomskys question was how does the child recognize that the QUESTION B
sentence is not the correct one. How does the child know that the matrix clauses auxiliary that
has to move? Platos answer to this question would be this knowledge is innate by born of the
fact that we all have lived a previous life. In Chomskys point of view, the innateness hypothesis
provides a solution to the fact, children learn finite number of linguistic input and innate
knowledge provides them all sorts of things that they cannot possibly have learned .

Cartesian Ideas:
The term Cartesian refers to the works of Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Cartesian view of mind
and brain saw it as mutually exclusive things. Descartes states that mind consisting of nonphysical thing which is distinct from the body. The primary distinction between Rene Descartes
mind and brain is, Physical objects are spatial and they are located somewhere . Mental Objectsthoughts and sensations, are are apparently non-spatial. We can not determine the size and shape
of our thoughts. Second distinction is qualitative, which states that the qualities of our experience
difficult to talk but but that need not affect our awareness of us. By showing these distinctions he
wanted to say that mental qualities are not a quality of material objects, It is different kind of
qualities from material qualities. The third distinction between the mental and the material
shows that the knowledge we have of our own state of mind is direct and unchallengeable in a
way that our knowledge of material objects is not.
Descartes himself believed that this knowledge was incorrigible: your thoughts about your
current states of mind could not be false. He believed, as well, that the contents of our own minds
were transparent to us. In consequence, if you are in a particular state of mind, then you know
you are in that state; and if you believe that you are in a particular state of mind, then you are in
that state3.

Heil John ,PHILOSOPHY OF MIND: A contemporary introduction , London and New York.page-17

Another distinction between mind and brain in Cartesian dualism is the state of mental items are
private but material things are necessarily public. Mental items they are directly observable only
by the person, other than the person who have that mind can only infer them from their material
effects. And Descartes has given an explanation for this difference: He said that minds and
bodies are distinct kinds of substance and there is no overlap in the properties possessed by both.
Problems with Descartes Dualism:
The most important problem Descartes Dualism is the interaction between mind and body. How
they can interact with each other.Since Descartes, philosophers have been preoccupied with
how the mental can affect the physical, how something which is by definition insubstantial can
cause changes in spatially located entities: in other words, how the mind can move the body.
Descartes himself appealed to causal powers in the pineal gland, begging the question of
whether this gland was itself mental or materia4l .If our mind is an independent substance from
our body then how we can sleep unconsciously?, because the mind is essentially conscious.

Chomskys Perspective:
The Innate Theory ( also known as Innatist Theory, Nativist Theory, Rationalist Theory,) of
Language acquisition had been described in mid-20th (1959) by Noam Chomsky as a reaction
against the Behaviourist language learning theory. Chomsky has described first language
acquisition in the context of the Innate Theory. By proposing an Innate Idea theory Chomsky
does not mean the ideas are innate. He wants to show that all natural language share core features
which reflected in the structure of the human brain which core features are known as Universal
Grammar.
There are mainly two approaches have to generate different types of universal rules. One ,
Greenbergian rules are often on the form If a language has feature A, then it is likely to have
also feature B. Chomskian rules are of a more abstract and structural character, and are claimed
to be strictly universal, rather than just tendencies. In UG theory Chomsky wanted to show that
all languages are the property of the human mind and UG is the deep common structure of all
4

Smith Neil Chomsky Ideas and Ideals, CUP.

languages . The central concept of UG is UG is a theory of knowledge, not of behaviour;.. UG

theory holds that the speaker known a set of principles that apply to all languages, and
parameters that vary within clearly defined limits from one language to another. Acquiring
language means learning how these principles apply to a particular language and which value is
appropriate for each parameter. Each principle of language that is proposed is a substantive
claim about the mind of the speaker and the nature of the acquisition.5 Chomsky says that all
languages are same in abstract level. Every human mind has the capacity to process abstract
linguistics data because the human mind is biologically equipped with a device which make
language acquisition possible. The Innate biological foundation of the human body helps us to
acquire languages. Human children are biologically programed for language acquisition. They
are born with a special ability which enable them to learn language in a specific period of time.
The period is known as the critical period of language acquisition .
Eric Lenneberg (1967), in his book Biological Foundations of Language, proposed Critical
Period Hypothesis, which that there are a biological pre-determined period of life and during the
period language can easily be acquired. He has discussed the periods, Such as First and foremost
stage is crying. It seems a kind of instinctive communication. However six weeks after, the
cooing stage begins. In this stage babies gain control over their vocal folds. After cooing,
approximately in six months age, the baby reaches the babbling stage. At this stage babies try to
pronounce few syllables such as mama, papapa etc. After that when a baby reaches the twelfth
month of his life, he starts to pronounce single words, after that two-word stage. Later he able to
utter sentences with inflections, such as the progressive ing, plural s, etc. At the age of 5 he
becomes a fluent speaker but language acquisition is still continuing. Through this statement
Lenneberg provided a strong evidence to support the Chomskian view of language acquisition
which states that language is innately determined and in the existence of an innate universal set
of grammar.
This mechanism is known as LAD (Language Acquisition Device). LAD consists of Universal
Grammar (UG) and all the languages are basically formed with that universal ground. It does not
mean

that all human languages have the same grammar, or all humans are biologically

Cook, V[ivian] J[ames]. Chomskys Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell,

1988. page 1-2.

programmed with all the surface expression of human languages. Rather, UG provides a set of
core grammatical function or deep abstract principles that are common in all natural languages,
which explains how children acquire their languages or how they construct valid sentences of
their language in a relatively short period of time. Chomsky defined these abstract
representations of grammatical rules as language universals. On other hand Chomsky proposed
peripheral grammar which is different from universal grammar in the term of abstractness.
Peripheral Grammars features and rules are not determined by UG .
It is true that Chomskys theory rich enough to provide substantial knowledge of how a child
acquires his/her first language. But the behavioristic view of language learning can not totally
be ignored, it might be a complement to Chomskys theory. For example, the role of imitations
and repetitions cannot be wholly denied in such areas like learning vocabulary items and
structural patterns. Because the biological foundation of the human is being changed through
mutation and it is happening because of the external world and behavior. it would be wrong to
think of language as something which is governed only by internal mechanisms. These
mechanisms require external stimulation in order to work properly. The child needs a rich
verbal environment during the acquisition period.6

Biological Explanation of Innateness Controversy:

Since the time of Darwin to till now only two models are being followed by the Biologist and
Anthropologist which show human genetics evolution and closest relatives(ancestor).

One

model (1920s - 1960s, ) shows that human were distanced from the great apes,. Another one
(Late 1890searly 1900s and 1960spresent ) which was given by Darwin , according to this
model of human evolution humans are closest relatives of African apes. As Roger Lewin has
mentioned-From the time of Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel until soon after the turn of the
twentieth century, humans closest relatives were regarded as being the African apes, the

Aitchison Jean, The Articulate Mammal An introduction to psycholinguistics ,Fifth edition, Routledge publishing,
page-95

chimpanzee and gorilla, with the Asian great ape, the orangutan, being considered to be
somewhat separate. From the 1920s until the 1960s, humans were distanced from the great apes,
which were said to be an evolutionarily closely knit group. Since the 1960s,
however,conventional wisdom has returned to its Darwinian cast.7
We have Innate knowledge capacity but our ancestors (African apes) did not have, where did
Innate Knowledge comes from?
So, we are agreed that our ancestors are African apes, if we were originated from Apes in the
course of evolution of human beings then my question is where did Innate Knowledge come
from? Because, Recent study shows that language is uniquely a human property. Apes and Nonhuman animals may have some linguistics feature (such as, bees can refer future which called
displacement) but they dont have language and their communicative properties genetically
transmitted.
As Chomsky has mentioned Language learning is distinct from other cognitive capacities.
Apes and human both have other cognitive capacities (such as some instinctual behaviors, some
features of the language as a communicative signal ) but apes dont have language. As per as
Chomskys point of view Human mind has a special kind of property to learn languages which is
known as a language acquisition device. LAD consists of Universal Grammar (UG) and all the
languages are basically formed with that universal ground. But apes communicative signals are
genetically transmitted and there communicative signals do not have the productiveness. So, by
this we can conclude that our ancestors did not have Innate knowledge, in the course of evolution
we have developed the innate knowledge through mutation of genetic traits . Mutation refers to
the process of alteration, duplication of DNA sequence in a chromosome whether it would be a
short term mutation or long term mutation. Evolution of language in human brain must be a long
term mutation .
Then my question is, what were the selection force human being to make humankind separate
from other species in the term of language.Scientists had to account for human origins in
naturalistic rather than supernatural terms. More importantly, they had to account for the

Roger Lewin, HUMAN, EVOLUTION: AN ILLUSTRATED INTRODUCTION, Blackwell Publishing , Fifth edition
published 2005, Page-12.

evolutionary origin of the special qualities of humankind, those that appear to separate us from
the world of nature.8 If we agreed with Bloomfields Jack and Jill, example then it would be
Biological Necessity. Example isSuppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lean. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree.
She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and lips.
Why I am saying it is Biological Necessity need to be clear. So , in this example Jills feeling
of hunger is inborn Biological, instinctual and

unconditioned behaviour which causes the

conditioned reflex action noise. By inborn and unconditioned behavior I mean the feeling of
hunger we do not have to learn and it's not conditioned by anything. For example if we feel
hunger then we need food but seeing food we do not feel hungry. It might be possible that there
are some inborn Biological, instinctual behaviors which force us to learn languages.
But,if human language learning capacity (Innateness) has been developed due to Biological
Necessity then the non- human animals could be a talking animals. However , there must be
some socio-cultural reason other than animals which force human beings to developed language.
The human brain is divided into into two hemispheres, the left and right hemispheres. The left
brain is responsible for verbal expression like language, thoughts, and other things that contain
words. The right side of the brain responsible for our emotional, nonverbal experience, such as
music and art. In the course of evolution size of the human brain has been increased .The
human brain is three times larger than it would be if humans were apes9. The each hemisphere
of human brain consisting of four lobes: frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital. The size
parietal and temporal lobes in human brain has been increased through mutation whereas ape like
brain consist of much smaller parietal and temporal lobes. It may be due to the lateralization of
language in the human brain. More than 90% peoples have left-hemisphere dominance for
language, that is why the left hemisphere is larger than the right.
However, The first biologically modern Homo Sapiens evolved around 200,000 years ago from
Homo Heidelbergensis (Neanderthals) . In the course of Mutation human brain has developed
8

Roger Lewin, HUMAN, EVOLUTION: AN ILLUSTRATED INTRODUCTION, Blackwell Publishing , Fifth edition
published 2005, Page-13
9
Roger Lewin, HUMAN, EVOLUTION: AN ILLUSTRATED INTRODUCTION, Blackwell Publishing , Fifth edition
published 2005, Page-218

with some new traits, such as language learning/ acquisition property of the human brain, thats
may be the possible cause of brains expansion.
Finally, biologically there might be two reasons which forced humankind to develop a mind with
Innate Knowledge to acquire language very easy, First, In the Biological point of view sometime
Innate knowledge seems a product of Mutation. As we have seen modern Homo Sapiens have
been separated from Homo Heidelbergensis around 200,000 years ago. And a recent study shows
that the gene, known as FOXP2, and estimate that it first appeared in human around 120,000
years ago which is responsible for language activity. It might be possible that after separation as
modern Homo Sapiens, some socio-cultural facts force human beings to develop language, and
in the course of mutation human beings developed some innate traits which is determined by
genetics.
Second, Biologically there are many inborn instinctual behavior inside the human body and it is
controlled by biological system of the human body. But I am not saying language is an
instinctual property of human beings. I agree with Chomskys innateness which states that there
are some similarities between human mind and core grammar of all languages of the world. It
means human mind structured in a certain way which allow the mind to perceive universal
grammar. If innateness is structured system then how it is being formed ? . The answer is, In the
course of evolution of the human mind , from apelike brain to human brain , the gene has been
mutated and stored the core structure of language as the inborn property of human beings. The
human gene tells the physical part of the brain to form brain with a core structure of language or
universal grammar.

Is language really uniquely human ?

Several experimenters have been attempted to to teach language to non-human primates by the
researcher with some measure of success, such as The Lana project. The Lana (LANguage
Analogue) project had been started at Rumbaugh and colleagues in 1972. The aim was to teach
Lana, a two-year-old chimpanzee human language. Lana was able to understand few
grammatical structures and memories a chain of stimulus-response sequences. But one of the

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fundamental properties of human language (Recursivity or Productivity ) was missing. So ,very

few

nonhuman primates can learn language but not completely. Universally language is

uniquely human, what apes learnt thats not a language , thats just a few features of the
language. There communicative abilities are determined

genetically. So it seems that the

innateness controversy related to nonhuman animals is unnecessary.

Conclusions
In conclusion, we could say that language is a useful biological faculty of human and
human body biologically programed in a way which has given a language learning faculty to
human beings. Language organ, the biological system which is found only in humans, thats
made separate human from other living species. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD),
almost always produces the right linguistic output, even in the absence of sufficient input from
their environment and seems a property of the human brain. Human mind genetically formed
with innate knowledge. However , in the course of evolution human beings equipped with
language approximately 100000- 200000 year ago due to some social and cultural reason other
than animals. At that period of time human beings have developed a gene through mutation
which is responsible for our language acquisition friendly brain.

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References:
Aitchison Jean, The Articulate Mammal An introduction to psycholinguistics ,Fifth
edition, Routledge publishing. Page-79-90,95.
Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Chomsky, N., Language and Mind , Cambridge University Press.
Cook, V[ivian] J[ames]. Chomskys Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Oxford:
Blackwell,1988. 1-2
E. Terry, The Genetics of Cognitive Neuroscience, The MIT Press Cambridge,
Massachusetts London, England.
Heil John ,PHILOSOPHY OF MIND: A contemporary introduction , London and New
York.
Lewin Roger, HUMAN, EVOLUTION: AN ILLUSTRATED INTRODUCTION,
Blackwell Publishing , Fifth edition published 2005,
Samuels Richard , Innateness in cognitive science, Philosophy Department, Kings
College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.

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